SAN SALVADOR — August 23, 2026
On August 21, the U.S. State Department announced it will host an economic summit with El Salvador, calling President Nayib Bukele “one of our most valued partners in the region” and pledging to deepen the partnership between the two nations. The announcement is the latest step in a rapidly warming economic relationship — but it arrives even as the same Salvadoran government has spent the past year and a half waging one of the hemisphere’s most aggressive campaigns against independent journalism, freezing the assets of the news outlet that first documented Bukele’s alleged pact with the gangs he claims to have defeated.
The economic side of the relationship has moved quickly. In January, the two countries signed a Framework for an Agreement on Reciprocal Trade and Investment, supplemental to the existing CAFTA-DR free trade pact, under which El Salvador agreed to simplify regulatory requirements for U.S. exports, accepting American vehicle safety standards, FDA certificates, and pharmaceutical approvals, while the U.S. committed to eliminating reciprocal tariffs on Salvadoran goods that can’t be produced domestically in sufficient quantity, along with CAFTA-DR-linked textile and apparel exports. Most Salvadoran goods still face a 10% baseline U.S. tariff, but the framework opens the door to further relief tied to national-security cooperation and supply-chain resilience. The deal also comes as El Salvador courts large-scale mining investment following a 2024 law that lifted the country’s ban on metallic mining, a move analysts at the Inter-American Dialogue say could position the country as a niche player in critical mineral supply chains, if it can manage the governance and environmental risks that go with it. The IMF projects El Salvador’s economy will grow roughly 2.5 to 3% annually through 2027, a favorable outlook the coming summit is designed to reinforce.
That is the version of El Salvador the summit is built to showcase: a stable, dollarized, security-minded economy open for American business. It is not the version described by the roughly 50 Salvadoran journalists who, according to the Association of Journalists of El Salvador, have fled the country since 2025 out of fear of imprisonment, including nearly the entire editorial staff of El Faro, the investigative outlet whose reporting first forced the “pact with the gangs” story into public view.
The specific trigger was a documentary, “The Deal: Trump, Bukele & the Gangs of El Salvador,” co-produced by El Faro and PBS Frontline, built around interviews with two former leaders of the 18th Street gang describing a negotiated arrangement in which Bukele’s government allegedly traded reduced pressure and privileges for a drop in the homicide rate that Bukele has built his political brand on. El Faro editor Carlos Dada said the government moved to prepare arrest warrants against as many as seven of his journalists after the interviews aired; the outlet’s entire staff, already operating from exile in Costa Rica since 2023 due to earlier harassment, has yet to return.
The retaliation escalated from there. Between February and April of this year, the Bukele government’s Ministry of Finance froze a bank account and a property belonging to two partners of El Faro’s parent company, officially citing alleged tax debts. The Committee to Protect Journalists called the timing connected to the outlet’s reporting and to testimony a deputy editor gave before the U.S. Congress’s Tom Lantos Human Rights Commission, and demanded the assets be unfrozen. Citizen Lab has separately documented Pegasus spyware infections on the phones of at least 35 individuals tied to El Faro and six other Salvadoran outlets, along with several civil-society organizations. Human rights group Cristosal left the country entirely in mid-2025 after its own harassment mounted, and prominent activist Ruth López has now spent more than a year in prison without trial.
The Bukele government has offered its own framing of events. State intelligence director Peter Dumas has accused El Faro’s journalists of being financed and linked to gangs, drug trafficking, and other crimes, writing that they “can’t hide behind the invisible privilege of ‘journalism’ forever,” rhetoric press-freedom monitors say is designed to justify further surveillance funding rather than to answer the substance of the gang-pact reporting. All of this unfolds under El Salvador’s ongoing state of exception, in place since 2022, under which close to 80,000 people have been detained on gang-affiliation grounds, largely without due process, the same security apparatus that has made El Salvador attractive to the Trump administration as a jailer for migrants deported from the United States to CECOT, the country’s Terrorism Confinement Center.
That arrangement is precisely why the coming economic summit matters beyond trade statistics. Washington’s embrace of Bukele has increasingly bundled two separate transactions, a reciprocal trade relationship and a deportation-and-detention partnership, into a single, mutually reinforcing alliance, one in which economic warmth appears to buy diplomatic silence on the human-rights costs of Bukele’s domestic crackdown. As the two governments prepare to advance their shared economic interests, the journalists who first reported on how that alliance was built still can’t safely go home to cover what happens next.
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